A man in blue jeans just walked across Abbey Road. He moved slowly, knees high and steps exaggerated, so that his companion could take a photograph of him midstep.

I know this because I saw it happen. I watched someone cross the street in London from 3,600 miles away. Yes, there's an Abbey Road livestream, a video camera trained on the crosswalk made famous by the 1969 Beatles album Abbey Road. And as far as livestreams go, this one instantly joins the ranks of other beloved feeds like Explorer's bear cam and Nautilus Live's shipwreck cam— but it offers something all its own.

The appeal of those other livestreams, in particular, is the rare access they provide. A close-up look at a brown bear swiping a slippery salmon makes you feel like you're in the freezing water with them. A diver's view of a shipwreck comes into eerie focus as she encounters it.

But the Abbey Road Crossing Cam, run by the legendary recording studio nearby, is captivating in another way. It shows you something you've likely already seen many, many times—but rattles conventional framing. The livestream recontextualizes a geographic place that has been photographed from one vantage point over and over and over again, rarely considered from other angles.

Experience Abbey Road on Instagram or Flickr, for instance, and you'll find endless imitations of the famous album cover. People like to mimic the album cover, the same way they jump up and down like Rocky on the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, or pose so that it looks like they're propping up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The Abbey Road livestream reveals the sense of place behind the cliche. There are people lining up on either side of the street, waiting for a turn to cross. There are pedestrians who pause halfway for selfies, and foursomes who stop mid-stride. There's also a good deal of dashing out of the way—Abbey Road is busy with cars, vans, and double-decker buses just trying to get where they're going. With the volume up, you can hear the shushing of traffic and the occasional car horn.

There's also an element of people performing for the cam. For the 10 minutes or so that I watched, I saw several passersby smile up at the camera. One woman paused to hold up what looked like the flag of Argentina.

Screenshot of Abbey Road Studios Crossing Cam

Another woman waved at the camera, smiled down at her phone and appeared to send some text messages before looking up and waving again.

Screenshot of Abbey Road Studios Crossing Cam

The people in the crosswalk, below, stopped traffic for a good 10 seconds to get their shot:

Screenshot of Abbey Road Studios Crossing Cam

It sort of defeats the purpose, though, to post stills. Really, it's the right nowness and the motion of the livestream that makes it so watchable. Seeing people move through space and time at Abbey Road brings into relief that it's a real place, and underscores how it's always changing. All of which is much more interesting than the album-cover-esque framing we already know.

It also raises the question of why so many people take the same pictures over and over. To pay homage, to be funny, to be part of something bigger, culturally, okay—but isn't it much more intriguing to see a landmark the way you've never seen it before? It's why there's something oddly compelling about a 1960s photo of Abbey Road empty, which evokes the sort of pleasant disconnect you get from looking at an image of a now-famous landmark from when it was still under construction.

But our way of seeing the world is full of visual platitudes, more than we could ever possibly catalog, which we end up reenacting both intentionally and unintentionally. The writer Lawrence Weschler long kept a notebook of these sorts of visual rhymes. What he found was that people constantly echo what they've seen before—both geographically and interpersonally.

For example, the generals who gathered around Che Guevara's deathbed in 1967, organized themselves such that they appeared, uncannily, like the figures in Rembrandt's famous painting, The Anatomy Lesson—an observation made by the novelist John Berger and passed on by Weschler in his book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.

"Part of what I'm interested in is the way images set the context for other images," Weschler told C-SPAN2 in a 2006 interview. "We go through the world awash with these sort of cliches in our head... There are certain kinds of images that are just kind of hot-wired in us, and as we experience the chaos of the world, we perceive things in those terms."

As Weschler began to look for them, he found these sorts of visual echoes everywhere. Like when The New Yorker featured Monica Lewinksy as the Mona Lisa on one if its covers in 1999, and, shortly after, Lewinsky then posed in a way that made her look just like the Mona Lisa. "If you look at those hands, and look at her posture," Weschler said, "she herself becomes the Mona Lisa."

Screenshot from New Yorker archives

Screenshot from C-SPAN2

So much of people's understanding of the world comes from a visual processing of it. And we aren't always aware of the extent to which we adopt the frames and contexts we've already seen. The proliferation of digital cameras and networked photo sharing has only increased this sort of contextual mimicry—surely by now you've seen photographs in which everyone is jumping a few feet off the ground, or the tips of a person's Chuck Taylors peeking into the bottom of the frame of an image taken with a camera pointed at the sidewalk.

How we choose to capture the places we encounter has as much to do with the people who have been there before as it does with our own experience of a place. And much of the time, people end up forcing an impression of an impression on a place—an idea they already had when they arrived—that may or may not reveal what the place is actually like at all.

Most Popular

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.